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Comment Re:What's the problem? (Score 4, Interesting) 246

The definitions of 'advance or promote'; and 'equity ideology' are as well. You are basically looking at a situation where you could get hit with a $1.5 million clawback at any time for more or less anything someone at least vaguely connected to the PSF says that someone ends up feeling thin skinned about.

We're not even talking having to do anything: one probably-justified comment about how many people are going to get ICEd on the way to PyCon US this year would, in theory, be readable as falling under Executive Order 2(viii) " the United States is fundamentally racist, sexist, or otherwise discriminatory."

Or, on the even-harder-to-avoid and less inflammatory side; it could just be someone doing vibe statistics about PSF grant recipients (257 groups or individuals last year; so a decent sized sample if the coming year or two aren't wildly lower) and kicking up a fuss on twitter about how they don't seem perfectly demographically matched to the ideal techbro. Wouldn't even need to be terribly plausible or statistically significant, just enough to chum the water a little.

If this were actually just about who gets hired to execute the work specifically funded by the grant the risk would at least be manageable enough to actually treat it as a meaningful choice you are being asked to make, rather than just a sword of Damocles.

Comment Well most people apparently believe in sky fairies (Score 1) 75

(i.e. god)

i.e. people on average aren't empirical or rational at all, but rather, mostly tribal-social.

so it's not surprising that people with ferretman's climate-denial beliefs abound.

People don't actually know HOW to believe properly (i.e. how to use scientific method to weight and adjust their beliefs), never mind what to believe.

Comment Re:Nadella is missing the mark here (Score 1) 51

I don't know that MS has been caught doing data transfers specifically(though they'd have to screw it up or have it leaked at a fairly high level to get caught; 'cloud' is basically always opaque on the back end as far as the customer can see); but there have been a couple of instances recently of service getting cancelled. When Trump got into a snit with the ICC cut their chief prosecutor off(Brad Smith mollified more or less nobody with the claim that they didn't cancel service to the ICC, just to the senior official that the feds were upset with, which is probably technically true in the sense of account GUIDs but not usefully true); and the also kicked Unit 8200 out of their cozy custom Azure environment; though apparently with enough notice that they were able to move the data somewhere else.

It seems likely that random European corporations see themselves as lower profile and less vulnerable than the ICC or Israeli military intelligence; but if anyone doing risk assessment for them hasn't at least considered the fact that basically a belligerent old man would just have to decide that they are 'very unfair' tomorrow; or that someone other than greenland needs to be brought into the homeland, and that would potentially be all it takes for your MS EA to just stop talking to you then they aren't doing their jobs very thoroughly.

Comment You're kind of missing the (inflection) point (Score 1) 73

There will come a time, and it's almost certainly within a generation from now, when AI and automation will be better than let's say 90% of humans at the things that those humans do in the economy. 90% figure pulled out of orifice. Could be 80%, could be 99%. Doesn't qualitatively matter from a socioeconomic problem and policy perspective.

And the AI and automation will also be better than 90% of humans at whatever new "replacement" jobs people or AIs come up with as a spin-off of the new automated economy.

This is qualitatively different than many previous technological revolutions, in that NO faculty/capability of the average human will be more effective for work than the new automation.

Previously, when strong men wielding shovels and scythes were replaced by combine harvesters, those men could go on to another job, like construction, or plumbing, or computer programming, in a new urban economy. Horsemen and stablehands could become truck or taxi drivers and mechanics or oil workers or gas jockeys.

When hand weavers were replaced by looms, they could go on to become administrative functionaries or apparatchiks in some business or bureaucracy.

Soon, almost all of the replacement jobs or new functions needed in a re-jigged automated economy will themselves be more cost-effectively done by more AI and more automation. That is the difference.

If you get that (how it really is different this time), then you may be agile of mind enough to be one of the last to be replaced. If you can't grasp it, well good luck to you my fine fellow human.

Comment Re:Definitely worth to look further into this. (Score 1) 101

Out of curiosity, I opened the web version (https://teams.microsoft.com/v2/, in Firefox 144.0, on Mint 22.2, using Cinnamon 6.4.8 on a Beelink mini-desktop). To make the usual "test call", I can't go to three-dots (...)--> Settings --> Calls --> Devices (there is no "Devices" under THAT version of "Calls"). However, I CAN go to the "Calls" menu on the far left of the window --> Custom Setup (gear menu) --> Device Settings, and then do a Test Call.

From there, all works fine, including sound and video. Of course, all my Sound Input/Output devices work OK in the OS itself....

Comment Re:Definitely worth to look further into this. (Score 1) 101

I'm right now trying out Zorin OS, this could be an alternative for some since it has a look similar to Windows.
But is there a version of Teams for Linux?

I have a couple of people I *can* "upgrade" to W11 from W10, but I think they're ideal candidates to move to Zorin or Mint.

MS used to supply a desktop client of Teams for LInux, but hasn't for a year or more at this point. However, the web interface works well enough. And if you don't mind snaps on your system, you can try wrapping the web interface in a sort of desktop app: https://snapcraft.io/teams-for...

Comment Re:no shit? (Score 1) 79

I suspect that they feel at least incrementally less burned in this case; since, while it wasn't obviously a good idea for a product, it at least goes somewhere: if you can make a phone functional and adequately rigid at that size; it's quite possible that there's a more sensible device size that you can still apply the miniaturized motherboard and whatever mechanical engineering you did for rigidity to; and just fill the rest of the case with battery; and there may be some other cases where the ability to get an entire SoC and supporting components into a particularly tiny area or make a thin component of a larger system quite rigid is handy.

Still doesn't really explain flaying a normal phone until it barely has a normal day's use with a totally fresh battery when you are still going to glue an entire baby spy satellite to one end of it; but some of the actual engineering is probably reusable.
The 'butterfly' keyboards, or the under-mouse charging port, by contrast, went nowhere. They tried and failed at a few iterations of keyboards that committed expensive suicide if you looked at them wrong; then just went back to allocating the extra mm or whatever once Jony was safely out of the picture; and it's not as though putting the port on the bottom rather than the front of the mouse involved any interesting capability development.

Whatever product manager thought that the 'air' would be a big seller deserves to feel bad; but the actual engineering team can probably feel OK about the odds that a future phone will look somewhat air-like if you were to remove the normally shaped case and larger battery.

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